The Coloniality of Neoliberal English: The Enduring Structures of American Colonial English Instruction in the Philippines and Puerto Rico

Hsu, Funie

doi:10.5070/l27323549

Cited by 33 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…The case of bilingual education emblematizes the broader political economic history of 1960s' education-based reforms as a process of hegemonic interest convergence through which democratic and egalitarian aspirations were redirected into reforms that were as much about promoting social control as about attempting to alleviate poverty or inequity. Although bilingual education has become increasingly framed as a cultural project instead of an economic one in the decades since 1968 (Blanton, 2014;Dabach & Faltis, 2012;Hong, 2011;Michener, Sengupta-Irving, Proctor, & Silverman, 2015;Moran, 1988;Santa Ana, 2002;Suh, 2016), its longer legacy as a project of social control continues to shape debates even within its current iteration (Flores, 2016;Hsu, 2015;Sung, 2008;Zion, York, & Stickney, 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Accentuate the Positive; Eliminate the Negative”: Hegemonic Interest Convergence, Racialization of Latino Poverty, and the 1968 Bilingual Education Act

Sung

2017

Peabody Journal of Education

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Derrick Bell's interest convergence thesis is a seminal framework to analyze social change within critical race theory. While interest convergence's influence has grown, two foundational questions have been raised: do interest groups act rationally; does interest convergence also offer a change prescription or only an explanation of prior events. By revisiting Bell's early influences, via the concept of hegemony, the article intervenes in these two formative debates by offering a reimagined analytic framing that I term "hegemonic interest convergence." The article then applies this concept to analyze how broader political economic shifts shaped the struggles within which the 1968 Bilingual Education Act arose. I demonstrate that support for bilingual education stemmed from a seeming interest convergence among policymakers and Latino activists based on economic, rather than cultural, concerns regarding poor urbanizing Latino communities. In doing so, policymakers promoted the bill as a concession to redirect focus from other Latino demands for economic uplift and a tool to promote ideas of cultural deficit that reimagined job automation and outsourcing into linguistic and racial "handicaps." These findings are significant in illuminating how hegemonic interest convergence functions, thereby providing a novel historiographical analysis of the Bilingual Education Act as well as suggesting a possible strategy for future change.The 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education verdict of the United States Supreme Court to desegregate public schools has produced more scholarly publications than any other event in modern American educational history. Among the seminal studies, Derrick Bell's (1980) analysis of the decision via the thesis of interest convergence has become one of the leading frameworks within Brown historiography and, in doing so, bore the new interdisciplinary subfield of critical race theory. At its core, the interest convergence thesis offers an answer to the puzzle that civil rights leaders and scholars began questioning in the 1970s: why did the Brown case succeed during a conservative period best known for anti-communist McCarthyism, while 1970s civil rights gains stalled after an unprecedented decade of legal successes and broader social change? According

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Accentuate the Positive; Eliminate the Negative”: Hegemonic Interest Convergence, Racialization of Latino Poverty, and the 1968 Bilingual Education Act

Sung

2017

Peabody Journal of Education

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“…For example, English was promoted as a "language of salvation and progress" (Shahjahan, 2013;as cited in Hsu, 2015) during colonial times. Campaigns to promote the dominance of English have taken a variety of forms, including "Americanization" projects in the American Southwest and Puerto Rico, "Benevolent Assimilation" efforts in the Philippines, and efforts to force Native Americans to learn English under the philosophy of "Kill the Indian, save the man" (Hsu, 2015;Hsu, 2017). By considering the dominance of English and the influence of the colonial past, we can begin to see how they conspire to reproduce the same kinds of colonial relationships along racial and linguistic lines that foster the promotion of eliminating the word gap and teaching academic language for minoritized children.…”

Section: Overarching Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By considering the dominance of English and the influence of the colonial past, we can begin to see how they conspire to reproduce the same kinds of colonial relationships along racial and linguistic lines that foster the promotion of eliminating the word gap and teaching academic language for minoritized children. As Hsu (2015) notes, these histories are "explicitly included" in teacher education and TESOL programs because they promote the dominance of English for its utility in seeking certain economic and social goals (p. 141). Unfortunately, well-intentioned programs might promote the utility of English while simultaneously denigrating the language practices of students and their communities.…”

Section: Overarching Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dismantling Persistent Deficit Narratives About the Language and Literacy of Culturally and Linguistically Minoritized Children and Youth: Counter-Possibilities

et al. 2021

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Despite decades of efforts, deficit narratives regarding language development and use by children and students from historically marginalized backgrounds remain persistent in the United States. Examining selective literature, we discuss the ideologies that undergird two deficit narratives: the notion that some children have a “word gap” when compared to their White middle-class peers, and students must develop “academic language” to engage in rigorous content learning. The “word gap” concept came from a study wherein a group of young children in low-income families heard fewer words than those in middle-class families. It assumes that language can only be acquired in one way—vocabulary exchange from one parent to one child—and ignores decades of research on diverse pathways for language development. We highlight an alternative perspective that language development builds on children’s experience with cultural practices and the harm on minoritized children by privileging a specific form of vocabulary acquisition. The second deficit narrative concerns “academic language,” a concept championed by scholars aiming to address educational inequity. The construct runs the risk of undervaluing the potential of students from historically marginalized backgrounds to engage in learning using language that is “informal,” nonconventional, or “non-native like.” It also is sometimes used as a rationale to relegate students to special programs isolated from more rigorous academic discourse, thus ironically removing them from opportunities to develop the academic registers they are deemed to be missing. We explore alternative frameworks that shift the focus from linguistic features of academic talk and texts as prerequisites for academic work to the broad range of linguistic resources that students employ for academic purposes in the classroom. Finally, we turn to a positive approach to youths’ language development and use: translanguaging by multilingual learners and their teachers. Translanguaging demonstrates the power of a resource-oriented perspective that values students’ rich communicative repertoires and actively seeks to disrupt language hierarchies. We argue that this approach, however, must be considered in relation to the broader social context to meet its transformative aims. Together, our analysis suggests counter-possibilities to dismantle deficit-oriented narratives and points to promising directions for research and practices to reduce inequity in education.

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“…U.S. authorities enacted a number of changes in the educational system to Americanize these new students (Walsh, 1991), and the imposition of English was an educational priority across the territories. Many colonial administrators acknowledged that the development of the Spanish American school system also served a military goal: the pacification of an occupied territory (F. Hsu, 2015; Wesling, 2011). Moreover, U.S.‐administered schools in these extracontinental territories shared many teaching methodologies, goals, and ideologies developed in schools for Indigenous and African American students in the United States, such as the Carlisle Industrial Indian School in Pennsylvania and the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia (Coloma, 2009; Paulet, 2007).…”

Section: Relevant Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Historical Inquiry Into Bilingual Reading Textbooks: Coloniality and Biliteracy at the Turn of the 20th Century

Curiel

Durán

2020

Reading Research Quarterly

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The authors present an analysis of bilingual reading textbooks published at the turn of the 20th century. The authors examined the kinds of opportunities for learning offered by bilingual reading textbooks developed for students in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in the aftermath of the Spanish–American War. The analysis revealed challenges to understanding related to both the content and the structure of these textbooks, as well as the coloniality of knowledge embedded in them. The historical record also reveals a rejection of the format and content from scholars and educational leaders, and the subsequent turn toward reading materials, which better reflected the everyday experiences of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Filipinx children, albeit often monolingually rather than bilingually. Implications are offered for how contemporary literacy materials might support (bi)literacy development of bilingual students across the globe.

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The Coloniality of Neoliberal English: The Enduring Structures of American Colonial English Instruction in the Philippines and Puerto Rico

Cited by 33 publications

References 51 publications

“Accentuate the Positive; Eliminate the Negative”: Hegemonic Interest Convergence, Racialization of Latino Poverty, and the 1968 Bilingual Education Act

“Accentuate the Positive; Eliminate the Negative”: Hegemonic Interest Convergence, Racialization of Latino Poverty, and the 1968 Bilingual Education Act

Dismantling Persistent Deficit Narratives About the Language and Literacy of Culturally and Linguistically Minoritized Children and Youth: Counter-Possibilities

A Historical Inquiry Into Bilingual Reading Textbooks: Coloniality and Biliteracy at the Turn of the 20th Century

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